Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random.
This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.
I disagree with the uniform "should be", because there are so many different design objectives. Slot machines aren't "good games" by Euro standards, but people spend a lot of money on them. (One can argue about whether that's enjoyment or addiction. I'll skip that for now.) Random payoffs can foster enjoyment, as seen in Skinner Boxes and on slot machines. Random denial makes people unhappy. What you want in most games is some degree of random windfall but no one getting "killed by the dice".
Have you played Ambition, by chance? It's a trick-taking card game designed to remove card luck.
> This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.
Incidentally, apparently people complain about the online versions of the game providing a land distribution that's "too even".
Also, while mana screw sucks, between the fact that you can decide whether or not to begin with a certain opening hand and the fact that you can design your deck around such circumstances (mana fixing, proper distribution of card costs), it's far more fun than the alternative.
Incidentally, apparently people complain about the online versions of the game providing a land distribution that's "too even".
Online bridge has a similar problem. Four riffle shuffles (which does not fully randomize hands) is typical in bridge games, and this means that long suits (and, thus, better hands) are more common. Early online bridge games randomized hands fully and therefore delivered crappier (flatter) hands than people were typically used to.
between the fact that you can decide whether or not to begin with a certain opening hand and the fact that you can design your deck around such circumstances (mana fixing, proper distribution of card costs), it's far more fun than the alternative.
When I played (mid-90s) a lot of those options didn't exist. There weren't mulligans unless you had no land. With one, you had to play it. Also, a lot of the newer mana sources didn't exist. If you drew only 2 lands in your first 10 cards, you were screwed, but you couldn't develop an interesting deck with more than 22 land.
Eh, you'd design your deck around low-mana-cost cards, figuring that most of it had to work with 2-3 lands and the higher-casting-cost cards had to be used sparingly.
One of my favorite decks was an all-common blue/red control deck with 28 land, made so that I could bring it into school and not worry about it getting stolen. It was maddening to play against - I'd be like "Okay, I'll flood 3 of your creatures, block your knight with my clay statue, and counterspell your disenchant." Typically games would run 40 turns with nobody doing any damage, and then all of a sudden I'd be like "...and I'll Lava Burst you for 20. Game over." Or the Storm Shaman would come out around turn 10, by that time it's 5/4 and I've got enough mana to counterspell any attempts to remove it, and the game is over in 4 turns. Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
> Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
One of my favorite decks is loosely based on a 5-color preconstructed deck from the Apocalypse era - it's basically almost all mana fixing, with a few cards that take advantage of multiple colors, and then four "Life/Death"s[1]
All that time you spent doing nothing but playing land-generating spells suddenly pays off when you can attack with twenty 1/1 creatures in a single turn, then declare them unblockable[2] and rinse and repeat the next turn[3].
It's even better because land-destruction spells are much rarer (and more costly), so you're impervious to Wrath-of-God[4]-eque spells.
I don't know exactly how they model shuffling, but I know that some players dislike truly random hands, which is why it's considered improper and impolite to do more than 4 shuffles.
This may actually be somewhat of a myth. I haven't verified it myself. I do know that Bridge protocol is 4 riffle shuffles, and typical riffle shuffles don't have enough entropy for 4 of them to randomize the deck (52! ~ 2^225.6, so you'd need 56.4 bits for each, and riffle shuffles have about 30 bits) but I find it hard to envision why this (possibly slight) lack of randomness would manifest itself in higher frequencies of good hands.
I think you're committing a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Yes, people are designing their decks around mana screw. In other words - they discard all those decks ideas that suffer more from randomness. Also remember mana screw works both ways. Later in the game getting a streak of lands when you no longer need them can be disastrous. Your opponent can draw juicy cards instead.
Have you actually tried the alternatives ? There's a trivial variant of M:tG where you can play any card face down to act as a land.
You have a point, though - constructing a deck in M:tG is far more fun than playing one.
> Have you actually tried the alternatives ? There's a trivial variant of M:tG where you can play any card face down to act as a land.
That's not really eliminating randomness, since you're just evaluating (at runtime) whether or not a given card is more valuable as a mana source or at face value. There's still some randomness in determining how high the opportunity cost of playing a land is.
A better example of nonrandomness - which I have considered playing with my friends - is enforcing an even mana draw by increasing access to mana each turn in a manner proportional to the number of lands in the deck. That's deterministic.
> You have a point, though - constructing a deck in M:tG is far more fun than playing one.
I've been playing Magic: The Gathering for far longer than I should admit, and I'd disagree.
The thing about slot machines though, aside from the fact that the pay outs are not uniformly random, is that they're designed to have tons of almost-wins, i.e. "bar bar cherry". You think you're "so close" to having won that you think if you just try a couple times more, you'll really get it. This goes so far as to program the motors for the wheels to have a specific wobble, so they flip over from a winning combo to a losing one at the last second.
Comments
Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random.
This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.
I disagree with the uniform "should be", because there are so many different design objectives. Slot machines aren't "good games" by Euro standards, but people spend a lot of money on them. (One can argue about whether that's enjoyment or addiction. I'll skip that for now.) Random payoffs can foster enjoyment, as seen in Skinner Boxes and on slot machines. Random denial makes people unhappy. What you want in most games is some degree of random windfall but no one getting "killed by the dice".
Have you played Ambition, by chance? It's a trick-taking card game designed to remove card luck.
> This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.
Incidentally, apparently people complain about the online versions of the game providing a land distribution that's "too even".
Also, while mana screw sucks, between the fact that you can decide whether or not to begin with a certain opening hand and the fact that you can design your deck around such circumstances (mana fixing, proper distribution of card costs), it's far more fun than the alternative.
Incidentally, apparently people complain about the online versions of the game providing a land distribution that's "too even".
Online bridge has a similar problem. Four riffle shuffles (which does not fully randomize hands) is typical in bridge games, and this means that long suits (and, thus, better hands) are more common. Early online bridge games randomized hands fully and therefore delivered crappier (flatter) hands than people were typically used to.
between the fact that you can decide whether or not to begin with a certain opening hand and the fact that you can design your deck around such circumstances (mana fixing, proper distribution of card costs), it's far more fun than the alternative.
When I played (mid-90s) a lot of those options didn't exist. There weren't mulligans unless you had no land. With one, you had to play it. Also, a lot of the newer mana sources didn't exist. If you drew only 2 lands in your first 10 cards, you were screwed, but you couldn't develop an interesting deck with more than 22 land.
Eh, you'd design your deck around low-mana-cost cards, figuring that most of it had to work with 2-3 lands and the higher-casting-cost cards had to be used sparingly.
One of my favorite decks was an all-common blue/red control deck with 28 land, made so that I could bring it into school and not worry about it getting stolen. It was maddening to play against - I'd be like "Okay, I'll flood 3 of your creatures, block your knight with my clay statue, and counterspell your disenchant." Typically games would run 40 turns with nobody doing any damage, and then all of a sudden I'd be like "...and I'll Lava Burst you for 20. Game over." Or the Storm Shaman would come out around turn 10, by that time it's 5/4 and I've got enough mana to counterspell any attempts to remove it, and the game is over in 4 turns. Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
> Land can be devastatingly effective with cards made to take advantage of it.
One of my favorite decks is loosely based on a 5-color preconstructed deck from the Apocalypse era - it's basically almost all mana fixing, with a few cards that take advantage of multiple colors, and then four "Life/Death"s[1]
All that time you spent doing nothing but playing land-generating spells suddenly pays off when you can attack with twenty 1/1 creatures in a single turn, then declare them unblockable[2] and rinse and repeat the next turn[3].
It's even better because land-destruction spells are much rarer (and more costly), so you're impervious to Wrath-of-God[4]-eque spells.
[1]http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiver...
[2]http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiver...
[3] If, by some miracle, they had enough life to survive, that is.
[4] http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...
> Early online bridge games randomized hands fully and therefore delivered crappier (flatter) hands than people were typically used to.
Are you saying that all online bridge games today do not fully randomize the shuffle, but simulate riffle shuffles instead?
I don't know exactly how they model shuffling, but I know that some players dislike truly random hands, which is why it's considered improper and impolite to do more than 4 shuffles.
This may actually be somewhat of a myth. I haven't verified it myself. I do know that Bridge protocol is 4 riffle shuffles, and typical riffle shuffles don't have enough entropy for 4 of them to randomize the deck (52! ~ 2^225.6, so you'd need 56.4 bits for each, and riffle shuffles have about 30 bits) but I find it hard to envision why this (possibly slight) lack of randomness would manifest itself in higher frequencies of good hands.
I think you're committing a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Yes, people are designing their decks around mana screw. In other words - they discard all those decks ideas that suffer more from randomness. Also remember mana screw works both ways. Later in the game getting a streak of lands when you no longer need them can be disastrous. Your opponent can draw juicy cards instead.
Have you actually tried the alternatives ? There's a trivial variant of M:tG where you can play any card face down to act as a land.
You have a point, though - constructing a deck in M:tG is far more fun than playing one.
> Have you actually tried the alternatives ? There's a trivial variant of M:tG where you can play any card face down to act as a land.
That's not really eliminating randomness, since you're just evaluating (at runtime) whether or not a given card is more valuable as a mana source or at face value. There's still some randomness in determining how high the opportunity cost of playing a land is.
A better example of nonrandomness - which I have considered playing with my friends - is enforcing an even mana draw by increasing access to mana each turn in a manner proportional to the number of lands in the deck. That's deterministic.
> You have a point, though - constructing a deck in M:tG is far more fun than playing one.
I've been playing Magic: The Gathering for far longer than I should admit, and I'd disagree.
The thing about slot machines though, aside from the fact that the pay outs are not uniformly random, is that they're designed to have tons of almost-wins, i.e. "bar bar cherry". You think you're "so close" to having won that you think if you just try a couple times more, you'll really get it. This goes so far as to program the motors for the wheels to have a specific wobble, so they flip over from a winning combo to a losing one at the last second.